Archive for August, 2014

We’re pleased to announce that version 1.0 of PocketBible for Mac OS X is now available for download at the Laridian website! You can find out more about PocketBible and hundreds of Bibles and reference books available now for Mac here.

Easier Searching

The Mac version of PocketBible implements an improved search algorithm we first introduced in PocketBible for Android a few weeks ago. Rather than asking you to learn the language of Boolean algebra and regular expressions in order to be able to formulate a search specification, PocketBible allows you to simply tell it what you’re looking for, like “faith comes by hearing”. PocketBible performs about a dozen parallel searches to find not only every verse in which the phrase you’re searching for occurs, but also verses in which words that sound like or have the same root word as the words you’re looking for appear in the same order or close to the same order as you entered them. The result is that PocketBible for Mac OS X is more likely to find the verse you’re looking for than were previous versions. So a search for “faith comes by hearing” finds Romans 10:7 in the KJV even though in that verse, “comes” is “cometh”.

PocketBible for Mac also takes advantages of capabilities of our electronic books that we have never exposed before. For example, you can search a commentary not just for its discussion of a passage, but for everywhere the passage is mentioned.

Download Free

PocketBible for Mac requires OS X 10.7 and is available as a free download. Installation is easy: open the downloaded disk image and drag the PocketBible icon to the Applications folder (just like any number of Mac apps you download from the Web). PocketBible will prompt you to create an account or log into your existing account to gain access to dozens of free Bibles and reference books, or in the case that you are already a Laridian Bible software user on another platform, access to Bibles and books you’ve previously purchased for use in that program. Once you’ve entered your login credentials, you download books directly from the “Cloud Library” feature of the program as opposed to downloading an installation program from our website. Watch instructions below:

Sync your Personal Data

If you have notes, highlights, bookmarks, or devotional reading progress in another version of PocketBible that you have sync’ed to the Laridian Cloud server, you can turn on automatic synchronization in PocketBible for Mac and have access to all your user-created data on that platform as well.

Customize the Screen Layout

PocketBible allows you to customize the screen layout, arranging books into any number of tiled panes. You can open any number of books in each pane. Panes can be resized, and books can be moved from one pane to another by simply dragging the tab corresponding to the book into the tab bar of the target pane.

There’s More to Come!

As good as PocketBible is, we’re not done with it yet! We’ll be implementing a number of advanced features that will be available for a nominal price. These include multiple tabbed layouts, the ability to rename your highlight colors, journal notes (notes that are not connected to a Bible verse), and an expanded Autostudy feature you may have seen in PocketBible for iOS. We’ll have more to say about the Advanced Feature Set in upcoming weeks.

In the meantime, the best way to find out how PocketBible for Mac OS X can enhance your Bible study is to download it today!

You can purchase each volume separately for $19.99 or all 20 volumes in a bundle for $399.99. The books are available for use with PocketBible for Windows PC, Windows Store, Windows Phone, iOS, Android and Windows Mobile.

The Cornerstone commentaries offer some unique features:

Comments are based on the New Living Translation Bible text (although you can use the commentary with any Bible in PocketBible). Many of the authors and editors of the commentary series participated in the creation of the NLT.

The commentary is recent scholarship (2006 to present).

Presents the message of each passage as well as an overview of other issues surrounding the text

PocketBible for Android version 1.2.1 has been released to the Google Play Store. If you downloaded the app from Google Play, you should be automatically updated. If you are using a Kindle Fire (or other non-Google Play device), you can download the latest version by browsing to http://lpb.cc/android while on your device.

The major new enhancement to this version is to the search capabilities. We have completely overhauled the search feature to make it more thorough, more flexible, and more usable (no Boolean operators needed!).

Easier Searching, Better Results

Type any word or phrase in the search field. The results you get back will be broken out and ordered by relevance. There are 5 key results you’ll see:

Exact – whatever you searched for was found literally in the text, in that exact order.

All – We found places in the text where all the words you searched for were present, but they were not in any particular order.

Any – These sections contain any key words you searched for. We ignore some words based on how frequently they are used (a, an, the, etc.).

Roots – We found these sections based on slight variations of the word you searched for. This accounts for things like verb tenses, pluralization, and the like.

Sounds – These sections contain words that “sound” like what you searched for.

In addition, a new display setting has been added to allow you to mark or not mark search results in the text (Menu | Settings | Display). Search hits can be marked by color, bold, etc. and this is a temporary marking while the search is active.

Focus Your Searches for Faster Results

When you are creating a new search, you’ll see that you can limit searches by custom ranges – this would include pre-defined sections of the Bible or a specific book of the Bible. You can also choose to search only verses you have highlighted or bookmarked previously. Plus you can now search your own personal notes.

Search by Strong’s Number

We have had many requests in the past for the ability to search your Strong’s Numbered Bibles (i.e. KJVEC, NASEC, HCSBEC). This feature is also included. If you have open and active your Strong’s numbered Bible, you can search in the following ways:

Simply enter the Strong’s number (g26, for example) to see all occurrences of that Strong’s number.

Enter a colon and the Strong’s number after a word (love:g26) to see all verses where the word love is translated from the Strong’s word g26.

Enter a colon and hyphen plus the Strong’s number (love:-g26) to find all the occurrences of a word that are not translated from that particular Strong’s word.

Complete details on how you can use this new search feature are included in the Help option of the navigation menu in PocketBible.